I find that our team often agrees to do co-marketing activities without discussing whether that specific activity type is the most effective way to achieve what both teams want. What sort of process have you seen work well in helping marketing+partnership teams prioritize and commit to the right types of co-marketing activities? Thanks!

I built a partner co-marketing pipeline in Hubspot, where my partner managers can submit their requests and it creates a deal in the pipeline for partner marketing evaluation. There are two different forms they can submit: 1) External co-marketing request: This is for requests that they receive from partners for us to participate in their co-marketing. For example, a tech partner asking us to participate in their webinar, write an ebook submission, or sponsor an in-person event. 2) Internal co-marketing request: This is the request where my partner managers ask for their partners to be included in upcoming Okendo content based on their goals around partner activation, nurture, or retention. I have a section where they can request a specific type of content they want that partner to be included in, or they can just request "any type of content". Once these requests come in, I start a discussion with the partner managers about the opportunity to get a better idea of what they want to accomplish and if this is the right format. I also review our current bandwidth and content pipeline to see if it's something we can even support. I've found that having the pipeline makes the partner managers feel heard but it also helps set boundaries around what we can and cannot commit to. It also gives us a way to keep things in our backlog so we don't lose track if something has to be deprioritized in the short-term, but could be a good opportunity to re-evaluate in the future. This has helped my team gain a lot of trust with the partner managers in this evaluation process and they respect that they cannot commit partner marketing resources without our review.

There are a few different ways to prioritize and commit to the right types of co-marketing activities. One way is to first discuss what each team wants to achieve with the co-marketing activity. Once you know what the goals are, you can then identify which activity type would be the most effective way to reach those goals. Another way to prioritize is by looking at past co-marketing activities and seeing which ones were most successful in achieving the desired results. You can also look at similar activities that other companies have done and see how they fared. By doing this, you can get a better idea of what works well and what doesn't. Finally, it's always important to communicate regularly with your partner about the progress of the activity and make sure that both teams are on the same page. By doing this, you can ensure that everyone is getting the most out of the activity. Thanks!